When the War Was Over Read Free Page A

Rouge.
    The Khmer Rouge promoted such illusions by exercising their power behind a united front army and government based in Beijing since 1970 and theoretically headed by the non-communist Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
    What appeared as a weakness—the communists’ inability to proclaim straightforwardly who they were because Sihanouk was their movement’s figurehead—proved a master strategy. The Khmer Rouge did not appear to be a radical alternative to what had come before, merely a new variation on familiar Cambodian politicians. Thus, the Cambodian people followed the initial instructions of the Khmer Rouge when the war ended, obeyed their drastic orders in 1975, and marched into a life more miserable than any could imagine.
    There had been clues, but they were easily overlooked. Komphot had heard stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities, but he had seen atrocities committed by the Phnom Penh government troops as well. Soldiers of the Khmer Republic’s army (FANK in acronym) were known to behead the Khmer Rouge soldiers they captured, to slice open their bodies and eat their still-warm livers or disfigure them in revenge. Some commanders tried to prevent this practice, sanctioned by Cambodian custom. But atrocities were common enough for foreign photographers and reporters regularly to record the evidence, though after 1973, American publications refused to
print more atrocity photographs. Both sides were harsh to civilians and soldiers alike. Cruelty seemed a tactic of both armies, and Komphot assumed it would be abandoned after victory.
    Fundamentally Komphot believed there would have been no war in Cambodia without the war in Vietnam. If the Vietnam War ended, so would Cambodia’s and there would be peace. Komphot had to have faith in the Khmer Rouge because he had little else to believe in. All the other leaders of modern Cambodia had proved to be failures. Underlying that disappointment was his conviction, again common, that his relatively bountiful country had been betrayed by poor leadership. Allow the people and the country to develop without such figures and Cambodia would become one of the blessed nations of the world. Ironically, he and the Khmer Rouge shared that opinion but had drastically different concepts of the “people” and good leadership.

    As urbane and clear-sighted as he appeared, Komphot was as blinded as the rest of his fellow educated Cambodians. They had been raised to be naive about war, revolution, and the modern realities of Asia. They had grown up under the coddling, dictatorial rule of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk came to the throne in 1941 and ruled as king or chief of state until 1970. He spun a cocoon of soothing myths and updated legends to protect his people and country from the Indochina War and whatever evils might lurk outside the “paradise” of Cambodia. Sihanouk had inherited a country filled with a sense of doom, a people who were taught by colonialists that their race was threatened by ambitious neighbors, and whose culture had reached a zenith centuries earlier. Because of this version of history and resulting inclinations, Cambodians allowed Sihanouk to provide them “shelter,” to treat them like children hidden away in a tropical garden.
    The claim to paradise was not entirely implausible. The small population of Cambodia lived in a country blessed by beauty and possibilities of bounty. Cambodia sits in the lap of peninsular Southeast Asia, and the wide Mekong River flows down its center. There is precision to the country’s geography: The small Cardamom mountain chain rises in the west, sapphires and rubies buried in its hills; the navigable blue waters of the Gulf of Siam form the southern boundary; the Tonle Sap or Great Lake fills the northwest and feeds the Tonle Sap River flowing into the Mekong; the low, flat heartland is covered with irrigated rice fields and all varieties of tropical fruit, vegetables, and trees growing